News – May 2017

A special conference in Madrid on 13th May brought together psychoanalysts of the Lacanian orientation, in the wake of the French presidential elections, to discuss what the future role of psychoanalysis should be in the political sphere. In an address to the conference, Jacques-Alain Miller announced the launch of a new international journal of Lacanian politics, Heretic, which will be available as an online supplement to Lacan Quotidien. As Miller describes it, “It will be a publication at once with reference to Lacan and without any dogmatism, a sort of infinite conversation with which to orient ourselves in the world”. The intention is to publish texts in their own languages from a global list of commentators, with contributions coming from related parts of philosophy, sociology and economics. The full text of Miller’s address at the Madrid conference (translated into French from the original in Spanish) is available on Lacan Quotidienhere and the video from the conference is available (in Spanish) on the World Association’s site here.

Plenty of events of interest to Lacanians coming up over the next month. Beginning in chronological order on 6th June, Bogdan Wolf of the London Society of the NLS will continue his seminar series ‘Between Anxiety and Love’, with the 9th lesson entitled ‘The absent and the ubiquitous phallus – the ear and the voice’. Details and link to register are on the London Society’s site here.

In the US, Lacanian Compass will be holding its latest Virtual Meeting on Sunday 11th June via video conference, with a special guest lecture from Fabian Fajnwaks on ‘The Culture of Narcissism’. The event is free and open to all – for details of how to access the WebEx see the Lacanian Compass site. A list of all upcoming events from the group’s busy schedule is also available there.

The Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society postgraduate conference hosted by the Centre for Psychoanalysis, Middlesex University, will take place in London on Saturday 17th June. The last chance to book is 15th June. The one-day conference is designed to give students from all disciplines who are interested in psychoanalysis an opportunity to present and discuss their research in an informal and intellectually stimulating setting. A link to book and more details are here.

On 19th June the MA in Psychoanalytic Studies at Birkbeck, University of London will hold its Annual Lecture, this year entitled ‘Revisiting the Death Drive via Lacan, Zizek… and the Political’. Derek Hook will introduce a Lacanian reconceptualisation of the death drive and argue for its use as vital instrument of psychosocial and political analysis. Entry is free but booking in advance is recommended.

Meanwhile, in New York on 24th June Après-Coup Psychoanalytic Association will be hosting a panel discussion titled S’auteuriser de lui-même?, drawing on Lacan’s cryptic mantra regarding the training and authorisation of psychoanalysts. Alain Didier-Weill, Marco Antonio Coutinho Jorge, Paolo Lollo, and Jean-Michel Vives will be guest speakers. More details on the Association’s Facebook page as well.

The Freud Museum, London will be welcoming Lorenzo Chiesa on 4th July for a discussion of his latest book The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan. Chiesa will offer a close reading of Lacan’s effort in the early 1970s to formalize sexual difference as incompleteness, and give an assessment of its broader implications for philosophical realism and materialism. Full details on the Museum’s site and a link to register on the Eventbrite page.

For later in the year, Lacanian practitioners might also be interested in the clinical conference ‘Psychoanalysis & Sexuality Today’, planned for 21st October in Dublin. The event will feature contributors from all clinical orientations in Ireland alongside a number of Lacanian speakers. More details and registration on the Eventbrite page here.

From previous months’ events, the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna has now made available podcasts of a few of its recent guest lectures. They include Alenka Zupancic’s lecture ‘Freud and the ‘Death Drive’’ from 20th April; Giuseppe Civitarese and Bernard Toboul’s ‘Where is the Unconscious Today?’ from 18th March; and Jeanne Wolff Bernstein and Mariano Horenstein’s presentation at the ‘Dislocated Subject’ conference from last October.

LacanOnline.com is a site for exploring psychoanalysis through the work of Jacques Lacan

Jacques Lacan was a French psychoanalyst, 1901 - 1981.
Trained as a psychiatrist, he abandoned the profession in favour of psychoanalysis in the early thirties. After publishing his paper on the Mirror Stage in 1949, for which he is probably best known to the general public, in the early fifties Lacan embarked on a project he called the 'Return to Freud'.

Lacan began holding yearly seminars, starting in 1952, re-examining Freud's work. At the time, the theory and technique of psychoanalysis was facing a complete overhaul at the hands of post-Freudian psychoanalysts, many of whom had emigrated to the United States after the war. Lacan railed against their teaching of Freud, seeing it as an oversimplification of his work and a corruption of psychoanalytic technique reducing it to the status of life management. Through his seminars he offered another interpretation of Freud's work and psychoanalytic theory. Inventive, radical and adventurous, many still believe Lacan's to be a creative mis-reading of Freud.

However Lacan's seminars grew in popularity and as his teaching developed from a reading of Freud's text to an elaboration of his own concepts his teaching became more influential. Lacan continued to give yearly seminars until the year before his death in 1981. By that time, he had become a major intellectual figure in public life and had both created and disbanded his own school, separating his members both from the established psychoanalytic institutions and from each other.

Today, Lacanian theory is advanced by a number of disparate groupings of his followers and the technique of psychoanalysis he developed is practiced clinically by Lacanian analysts around the world.